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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Denis Joachim Collection
• Sale Date:
  19 Jun 2016 ~ 2pm - Session 1: Lots 1 - 321
  20 Jun 2016 ~ 10am - Session 2: Lots 322 - 480
  20 Jun 2016 ~ 2pm - Session 3: Lot 481 - 688
  20 Jun 2016 ~ 6pm - Session 4: Lots 689 - 818
• Lot #:
  47
• Lot Description:
  Flinders. Interesting Narrative of the Loss of His Majesty’s Armed Vessels the Porpoise and Cato,
  of London, upon Wreck Reef on their Passage from New South Wales to China; interspersed with Occasional Remarks on New South Wales, its Productions, Inhabitants, &c. By an Officer of the Porpoise, Never before published. Also the Loss of the Doddington, East Indiaman. Duodecimo, pp. [ii], 7-28 (complete), folding stipple-engraved frontispiece, a nice copy in more recent boards. London, Thomas Tegg, n.d. [1808?].
• Notes:
  A very scarce chapbook account of the wreck of the Porpoise and Cato off the Great Barrier Reef in 1803 at the outset of Flinders’s disastrous voyage back to England after his circumnavigation in H.M.S. Investigator. With the Investigator damaged beyond repair, he elected to return to England to secure a seaworthy ship to complete his survey of the north-west coast. The Porpoise and two merchant vessels, the Cato and the Bridgewater, left Port Jackson taking the route via Torres Strait. A few days later the Porpoise went aground on Wreck Reef, while the Cato was wrecked nearby. The Bridgewater disappeared without trace and was never found. Flinders set up a camp on the reef, organised the survivors, and then made the journey back to Sydney in a ship’s cutter, returning with rescue vessels, including the Cumberland, on which he then continued the voyage to England with a small crew. Unfortunately the Cumberland was in poor shape and he was forced to seek help at Mauritius, where the perfidious French governor kept him prisoner for over a decade, stealing his maps and charts which were handed over to the equally execrable François Péron who claimed Flinders’s work for himself in his account of the rival Baudin expedition. This was one of the chapbooks issued as part of Tegg’s Mariner’s Marvellous Magazine, or Wonders of the Ocean. “The authorship is attributed in the text to one ‘Mr Fitz-Daniel’, who is stated to have been an officer of the watch when the Porpoise struck, and the officer who accompanied Flinders in the cutter. There was no such person. The account is plagiarised from that in the Sydney Gazette, with additions supplied by the fancy of the compiler. A curious feature is that wherever numbers are given, one has been added in this version, presumably to allow for the fictitious ‘Mr Fitz-Daniel’...” (Ferguson). Ferguson, 474; Wantrup, 69.
• Estimate:
  A$800 - 1,200
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Books & Manuscripts

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.